Print PageGovernance systems can be expected to affect the resilience of built and natural environments within an urbanizing context. Our NSF Urban Long Term Research Areas – Exploratory (ULTRA-Ex) project examines the role of governance for a pair of cities, Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington, which have developed over the past three decades under contrasting policy regimes at the state, regional, and local levels. We ask three research questions: (1) How do differences in local and state levels of governance and policy affect the resilience of both social and ecological landscapes? (2) How do alternative land use planning strategies affect the provision of ecosystem services in response to different disturbance factors? And (3) How effectively do the processes and outcomes of monitoring ecosystem services provide a usable feedback loop in an urban socio-ecological system? We address these questions by assessing the multiple pathways through which human actions, governance systems, and the built and social infrastructure affect ecosystem services provided by landscape vegetation pattern and regional water quality. Our approach includes three focused projects (water quality, stormwater management and urban riparian greenspace conservation) that are tied together by three cross-cutting theme efforts (landscape scale development patterns, civic ecology and environmental education).
Results/Conclusions
For water quality patterns, we expect that landscape pattern and structure will affect both water quality patterns and that water quality variation will affect nearby property values. For stormwater management, we expect that various sustainable stormwater management strategies (e.g. bioswales) will provide community benefits including improved citizen understanding of ecological systems, improved water quality, and healthier neighborhoods. For urban riparian greenspace conservation, we expect that multiple layers of governance spanning from watershed councils to municipalities will affect riparian greenspace conservation, and that in turn will affect resident access and involvement with the conservation of urban greenspaces.
In our cross-cutting activities, we expect that variation in planning and governance at local to regional scales affects development and open space conservation. In our education research, we expect that activities that engage networks of teachers, students and organizations will promote improved understanding and engagement in urban environmental management at both the individual and community levels. Finally, in our civic ecology synthesis work, we expect that individual perceptions and knowledge levels about environmental amenities contribute to their conservation and that improved levels of ecological knowledge contribute to municipal level decision-making that improve management regarding stormwater management and riparian greenspace conservation.
